The semi-intellectual wanderings of a self-educating generalist

Monthly Archives: January 2015

Over the past month, I have been working heavily on prehistory and early antiquity. I have been getting these connected to each other and to elements of anthropology, personal studies, and science. I have also created stubs for the individual centuries of antiquity, which will eventually allow me to connect more content. For classical and medieval history, I have completed a review of the connections to anthropology, personal studies, and science. For modern history, I have finished a review of the peoples of the world and begun adding more nations and getting a better picture of modern development.

I have begun a general review of the history of sociology. This is going faster than the last such review, mostly because I don’t have as much to rewrite and add. I have finished the connections of peoples of the world to details of culture and reviewed the connections to anthropology, I have also been reviewing nations, and will soon be connecting these to elements of institutions.

I have also been reviewing the interconnections of peoples of the world, for instance considering which nations and peoples have most heavily influenced the development of Western Civilization, and similarly for Asiatic peoples. This has resulted in a few reversals and re-orderings of the weight I give to them, and some of the necessary development patterns.

I have also finished connecting a string of cities to social mechanics. A large number of nations and peoples now have some connection to the subject in a general way.

I have begin a lengthy process of renaming social structure and change to social mechanics. This is incomplete, and I have been intensively connecting social types and social structure to elements of anthropology, personal studies, and science. When this process is finished, I will be ready to examine social mechanics in more detail.

I have also finished connecting institutions to details of culture and anthropology, and science as the exist so far, and I have begin with a review of their history. As with sociology, there are more details connected, but not yet enough for a good narrative.

Armed with a new computer, I have resumed one of the projects I was working on a few years back.

I want to go back in time to some of the earlier programming languages and learn some basic techniques. Once upon a time, I had begun learning FORTRAN programming. This was back in prehistory when programming was done on punched cards, and all processing was done in batches.

I had actually begun learning BASIC, on a teletype machine using the high school’s system. One of my first independent projects was attempting to do geometry with cooordinates. It didn’t work, because the computer did hidden conversions between integer data and floating point data, and I didn’t realize that testing for equality with floating-point decimals is trickier than it is with integers. I skipped COBOL, and taught myself a smattering of Pascal and C, and later studied Java and C++ formally, but I never had quite the time or resources, or energy to dig into things the way I wanted to.

There are things I want to do that are slightly different from the conventional methods.

I want to do make better provisions for backup before I do something that’s a little past my current know-how, like properly setting up for multiple programming environments, but for now, I am using the Open Library to check out a text on BASIC programming and going through it and the exercises in it. I found that the Windows store has a BASIC interpreter, which should suit my needs and let me write and execute elementary programs.

I haven’t given up on the Knowledge Base. There was a slowdown when I misplaced the install disc for Old software on New Computer, because Old Pro software worked better than New Free Software for what I do with it, but I’m back up to working at speed. I’ve been using the divisions of prehistory, antiquity, and classical and medieval history to prompt rewrites and revisions of how history and peoples of the world are applied to various divisions of history. The results are cleaner looking and slightly more informative, and promise to be even more so once I move on to the next stages of my plan.